


always listening in an absence

by phaseblast



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-16 10:03:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11826450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phaseblast/pseuds/phaseblast
Summary: Russia is cold, and nobody wants to go outside. It makes all of them oddly domestic.





	always listening in an absence

**Author's Note:**

> written for a [prompt meme](http://dilaudid.tumblr.com/post/160588094343/9-for-hanzozenyatta) a while back & i suddenly decided to post it here because my ao3 is like, depressingly empty lmao. and so is the hanzo/zenyatta tag. two birds with one stone.

The way that Hanzo realises he’s been with Overwatch too long is that when he’s part of the small team stationed for several weeks in Russia, he starts to dread going outside with a genuine weight in his chest. It hits him during an argument about it one morning, which is the same argument they have every morning:

“I’m not going out there,” Hana says petulantly. She’s bundled herself up in an armchair with what looks like all of the spare blankets from the cupboard, and Hanzo can see the light from her phone coming out of the hole at the top where her head sticks out. He’s almost certain she’d stamp her foot for good measure if her feet weren’t trapped in the cocoon.

Across the room at the small dining table, Fareeha sighs. “Somebody has to go.”

It’s true; they need to restock on food, since they spend a fair bit of time in the house that Katya Volskaya is lending them, and they should also meet up with Zarya, who will have news on where they’re needed today. There are talks happening between Russia’s leaders and a coalition of omnics who are being driven out from surrounding areas — with Talon’s past interest in Russia’s political climate, they don’t have a lot of room for error here.

But Hanzo has to agree with Hana on this, because he’s been living in Gibraltar for several months now, and Russia is  _fucking cold_.

He doesn’t say anything when Fareeha turns to look at him. Instead, he slides his gaze off to the side and takes a long, slow sip of tea, determined to wait her out. She drops her head in her hands, groaning.

“ _Somebody has to go_ ,” she insists, but she doesn’t make any move to go herself either. She glances around the room, looking for someone else to foist the problem onto, presumably the only absent member of the household: “Where’s Zenyatta?”

“He went out,” Hanzo says over the rim of his mug of tea, cradling it in both hands. It’s the only thing that’s keeping his fingers from freezing. “For a walk.”

Hana makes a noise of disgust. “Ugh. Why?” She’s sunk further down into her ball of blankets; the lower half of her face is gone, and her voice comes out muffled.

He’d asked the same thing when Zenyatta told him earlier that he was leaving, so Hanzo has an answer for her: “He says that the cold morning air is refreshing.”

There’s an almost tangible pause in the room after he says that, a ringing tension that hangs in in the air alongside the cold. Fareeha stares at him in silence for a few long seconds, and then both of them hear shuffling from the armchair as Hana worms her way back out of her cocoon to better join in the staring.

She blinks at him, sluggishly. “He’s an omnic,” Hana says.

“I know.”

“He can’t feel—”

Hanzo hides his smile in his cup. “I am simply repeating what he said.” For the fun of it, more than anything. He knows Zenyatta well enough by now that his strange sense of humour has started to infect him.

Hana makes another disgusted noise and pulls a blanket over her head.

Truthfully, he suspects he knows the real reason why Zenyatta is out there. Genji — this new Genji that Hanzo is still learning to understand, unfamiliar and kind — would be doing the same thing; wandering the streets to find empathy in himself for people that only want him gone, as if he’s under any obligation to do such a thing.

But at least Genji would harbour some seed of anger over it, no matter how calm he seemed. Zenyatta takes in what will only hurt him with the bearing of a true martyr like that will  _change_  anything, and Hanzo would have gone out into the cold with him if he thought he could convince him to stop. It’s frustrating to watch, all the more so when Zenyatta never lets it disrupt his serenity.

He’s frowning, he realises, seeing the look that Fareeha is giving him. He goes back to his tea and tries to force his expression to relax, focused on the warmth suffusing his chest; on, without even meaning to think of it, the memory of the low hum that Zenyatta carries with him.

“You should text him,” Hana says suddenly. Hanzo meets her eyes, peeking out through a slit in her blankets, and she adds, “Tell him to get food while he’s out.”

Fareeha turns around in her chair to look at Hana, baffled. “You’re literally on your phone right now,” she says.

“Yeah,” Hana sniffs, “but he’ll  _do_  it if Hanzo-sunbae says to.”

Hanzo looks down and resolutely does not acknowledge Hana’s stare this time.

“I suspect he will bring something back without me saying anything,” he says simply, because he can’t really deny that Zenyatta has gone out of his way on several occasions to make him happy, and it’s not something he wants to talk about. It’s still a nebulous thing and a feeling that Hanzo feels an impulse to protect, some sort of exposed nerve, raw and easily damaged.

Twenty minutes later finds them all in the same places, Hanzo clutching a cup that is quickly going cold and Fareeha half-asleep on the table, and they’ve spent so long listening to nothing but distant city bustle and the quiet  _blip_  of Hana’s message alerts that when the doorbell rings, all three of them violently startle.

“Ya nhar aswad,” Fareeha sighs. She scrubs her hands over her face and then gets up to head for the door, every movement heavy with reluctance. “Hanzo,” she calls over her shoulder as she goes, “I made an executive decision just now. If he comes in that door without coffee, you’re going out.”

Caught in the midst of draining the rest of his tea with one last swig, Hanzo pauses. He lowers the mug. “Why me?” he shouts back, and Hana snickers underneath her blankets.

“I need my brain to work again, Shimada!”

Hanzo rolls his eyes and turns on his heel to move into the kitchen, where he starts to fill the sink, thinking that he might as well wash up the dishes from breakfast while he’s there.

It’ll be fine. Zenyatta is excruciatingly thoughtful; he surely will have brought back groceries without being asked, even when he doesn’t need them himself. It’s a quality Hanzo hasn’t been able to force himself to pick up on yet. Standing here at the sink and cleaning up after the others is already a world away from how he’s spent most of his life, but it seems paltry compared to the endless well of Zenyatta’s compassion. He wonders how long it took Genji to change; wonders, a little more darkly, if it’s even possible for him to change in the same way. If there isn’t something fundamentally wrong in him that can’t be fixed at all.

Something tugs at his shirt — and, preoccupied by the downward spiral of his own thoughts, with the cold making everything seem slow and lazy, Hanzo doesn’t react in time to save himself.

Two blocks of solid ice press against his bare skin on either side of his spine. Hanzo yelps, and at the same time there’s a  _thud_  as he drops the glass he was cleaning into the sink, panic firing from those cold spots down along his nerves to the tips of his fingers. In the other room, Hana is yowling with laughter; right behind him, there is a familiar hum, low and quiet.

He whirls around and glares at Zenyatta hovering there in the kitchen, who may not be able to arrange his expression as he pleases but  _does_  have his hands folded innocently in his lap.

His very, very cold hands.

“Do  _not_ do that,” Hanzo says, less menacing than he’d like, since he can almost picture the aura of smug satisfaction, Zenyatta’s humour something warm and gentle— “ _ever_ again.”

“Of course,” Zenyatta concedes serenely, a strange quality to his synthetic voice that Hanzo knows very well is laughter. “My apologies. I had no idea my hands were so cold, or I would never have done such a thing.”

Hanzo leans back against the kitchen counter with his hands over his face, because he can’t let Zenyatta see him trying this hard not to smile. “Did you at least bring back groceries to spare me the same fate?” he asks in the direction of the ceiling.

After he doesn’t get a response for one second, two, he lowers his hands and brings his gaze back down, looks to Zenyatta with a puzzled surprise.

“Ah,” Zenyatta says, just a single syllable. He is very still. “I would have, but unfortunately, it would seem that there are not many stores in the area that are welcoming to omnics.”

Oh, Hanzo thinks, and then with lightning strike intensity:  _oh._

He should have thought of that. Of course Zenyatta wouldn’t even be able to step into a corner store here. And with tensions as high as they are at the moment, something could have easily gone wrong with him just wandering the streets. He can handle himself, Hanzo knows that, has seen him fight when pressed, but still there’s a horrible black knot of anger and fear gathering somewhere below his heart, a sickness in his gut realising that he was blind and stupid to forget about the danger Zenyatta would be in.

The feeling isn’t unfamiliar. It’s a protective rage that he isn’t accustomed to these days, one that only ever sprung up in Genji’s defence and therefore one that was dormant for a decade, until Genji came himself to drag all of that out of the grave. He’s had it manifest a few times since then; he just wasn’t expecting it like this, swift and with all the force of a blow to the chest.

_Don’t you ever do that again,_  he doesn’t say, swallows it as soon as the words rise in his throat, because that’s what he would have— what he  _did_  say to Genji back then, often. Giving orders because he thought everything would be okay if he could just… control it. Hanzo doesn’t know if he really is any different now, but he’s trying to be. There have to be better words for the feeling, something other than force and anger.

He listens to that low hum and feels himself breathing into his lungs and slowly, slowly, all of the dark empties out of him, leaves him hollow but calmer, safer. He thinks about what he’s afraid of, and it seems simple.

“Next time you go out,” he finally says, his voice quiet, “I will go with you.”

As soon as the words are out, they seem like a mistake. All of a sudden it seems like he’s said something with too much gravity, that it could drag him down with it if he’s made a misstep, if Zenyatta doesn’t—

But Zenyatta just says, “I would like that very much,” and Hanzo doesn’t know how, but he gets the distinct impression that Zenyatta is beaming at him.

The two of them share a comfortable silence after that, Hanzo finishing the washing up, passing dishes and cups to Zenyatta to be dried and put away as he goes. It’s eventually interrupted by feet shuffling across the carpet towards them.

Hana appears at the doorway. She’s brought all the blankets with her, spilling out of her arms and trailing along the floor behind her. She looks between the both of them. “We still need food, you know,” she says.

That’s right — their original dilemma. Hanzo sighs and puts aside the last cleaned glass. “I will be back shortly, then,” he announces, turning to leave as Hana vanishes back into her armchair nest.

A hand on his upper arm stops him, the touch gentle, fingertips catching at the sleeve of his pea coat.

“Hanzo,” Zenyatta says, steady as always. “There was no need when I was on my own, but I  _can_  maintain a higher body temperature if I choose to.” He doesn’t take his hand away, and in fact, his fingers curl all the way around Hanzo’s bicep; he even tightens his grip slightly, a brief squeeze. “If you would not mind it, I could accompany you.”

Hanzo stares at him in stunned silence, trying to find a meaning to those words that isn’t the obvious. He can’t think of anything else. “Are you volunteering to be a space heater,” he asks, voice coming out flat with disbelief.

“I am also capable of carrying groceries,” Zenyatta tells him, playfully. He cants his head to the side just a little, and adds, “Your hands will not be cold.”

He tries to be wary. All these months into his time as a member of Overwatch and Hanzo is still always looking for traps, or stepping cautiously like everything might fall out underneath him all at once, because it feels like the only conclusion to the amount of undeserved kindness he’s been given. But even with that being the case, when it comes to Zenyatta, there isn’t much to be wary  _of_.

There’s also the fact that he really, earnestly does enjoy Zenyatta’s company. And it  _is_  cold out there, unbearably so.

“Very well,” Hanzo says, and on a sudden impulse, he threads his arm through Zenyatta’s, their elbows linked. “You explored the city already this morning; you can lead the way.”

Some strange sound runs through Zenyatta, louder than that constant humming, vibrating and musical — but he says nothing, and Hanzo walks with him out to the front door.

Fareeha wolf-whistles from the top of the stairs on their way out. Hanzo makes a note to himself to buy the cheapest instant coffee he can find.


End file.
